Bernie Sanders’s path to the Democratic presidential nomination looks more viable than ever. Despite making enemies within the party establishment because of his 2016 run, polls paint a nightmare scenario for Joe Biden and the rest of the Democratic presidential field that puts the Vermont senator up against President Trump.
“We’re feeling really confident that we’re going to win the nomination,” said Eric Blanc, an activist who works with the Sanders campaign on union issues. “Bernie is surging right when he needs to surge, and the momentum is with us.”
Supporters allege that Sanders’s candidacy wasn’t treated with appropriate seriousness by the media for nearly all of 2019 and blame that treatment for Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s rise while Sanders suffered in the polls. Those problems were compounded in October when Sanders suffered a heart attack and canceled campaign events for two weeks.
But the 78-year-old recovered quickly from his health problems and returned to the campaign trail with the largest rally of the Democratic primary that featured an endorsement from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the celebrity left-wing New York congresswoman. He ended 2019 with the best fundraising quarter of any of the candidates thus far, with $34.5 million.
With Warren’s support ticking downward and on the verge of total collapse and polls in Iowa and New Hampshire showing Sanders in the lead or tied for first place, the idea of him facing off against President Trump in the general election no longer seems like a fantasy.
“What we’re looking at is a win in Iowa, a win in New Hampshire, and that really makes it clear to the American public that Bernie is not only viable but our best bet to beat Trump,” Blanc said.
Early wins there would likely trigger a domino effect, causing more Warren supporters to abandon their candidate. Sanders’s strategy of winning back Biden supporters who cast ballots for him in 2016 would also see further success.
“It’s hard to imagine a scenario where both come out from the first few contests as still even,” University of New Hampshire political science professor Dante Scala said of Sanders and Warren.
Sanders, an independent senator and an outsider rather than a hard-line Democrat, could still struggle to consolidate support. A strong finish by former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg in Iowa and New Hampshire would embolden the many centrist candidates to stay in the race and split any remaining support that would otherwise go to Biden.
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Those close to the former vice president’s campaign have expressed concern about whether wealthy donors would stop writing checks after early Sanders victories. Many of those willing to write $2,700 checks would likely scramble to find an alternative to a populist-socialist takeover of the Democratic Party and worsen Biden’s current fundraising difficulties.
Then comes Super Tuesday on March 3, with contests that will allocate more than a third of delegates to the Democratic National Convention. That includes two delegate-rich states: Texas and California.
Billionaire and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who is skipping competing in the first four early voting states, would join Buttigieg in siphoning off voters from Biden during Super Tuesday and beyond, further weakening his delegate count.
“What’s new and different this time is California. That’s going to be the game-changer,” said Labor for Bernie co-founder Rand Wilson. “It brings a different rhythm and different scenario than we’ve seen in the primaries in the past.”
The most recent poll of likely California Democratic primary voters from KQED/NPR in December found Sanders leading with 26%, followed by Warren at 23% and Biden at 19%.
A win for Sanders there and in other Super Tuesday states favorable to him, such as Minnesota, Vermont, Maine, and Colorado, could easily cancel out Biden’s expected dominance and delegate count in Southern states, where he remains popular.
“Sanders could put together this coalition of progressive, some white working-class voters, Latinos, Latinas,” Scala said. “It would be a bit unorthodox, but it’s not implausible. I like his coalition-building potential more than Pete Buttigieg at this point.”
Biden’s firewall, which includes the black-heavy South, is also more vulnerable to flip from a more centrist candidate than in the 2016 primary. Sanders has made a tremendous effort to earn support from black lawmakers throughout the region, and in some states, his staff is composed entirely of minorities.
“The big story is the extent to which the Bernie campaign, this time, unlike in 2016, really has the resources and attention to other states and people of color in particular,” said Blanc. “Bernie is a known quantity in the South now. I don’t think Biden, by any stretch of the imagination, is going to be able to sweep those states.”
President Trump’s reelection campaign has also awoken to the idea of facing Sanders in a general election. In a break from the Trump campaign’s relentless attacks on Biden, it targeted Sanders in back-to-back press releases on Wednesday and Thursday. The “fossil fuel-guzzling millionaire” who “can’t be trusted to defend American lives,” the press released argued, is “the Democrats’ leading candidate for president.”
Sanders’s path to a majority of delegates, though, relies on a perfect storm in an unpredictable primary that could just as easily kill his path instead of forging it.
“I could sketch out an alternative scenario where Biden wins New Hampshire, Biden wins Iowa,” Scala said, allowing Biden to “waltz to the nomination” easily.
